Deeplinks Blog posts about Bloggers' Rights

EFF and five news organizations recently filed an amicus brief (pdf) urging an Indiana appeals court to block a subpoena seeking to expose the identity of an anonymous speaker who posted a comment on the Indianapolis Star's website. This is a case of first impression in Indiana.

The subpoena stems from an underlying lawsuit filed by the former head of Junior Achievement of Central Indiana, a non-profit whose mission is to teach children about business management and finance. Among other things, Jeffrey Miller alleges that Junior Achievement and two of its high-level officers defamed him by claiming that he misappropriated money from the organization.

In the wake of "Amina" hoax, in which the popular blog of a Syrian woman turned out to be a fictional work by an American man named Tom MacMaster, it has been all too easy to gloss over the real tragedies on the ground in Syria.

For years, the Syrian regime has censored the Internet pervasively, with heavy focus on political content, as well as social media. In 2010, the relatively unfettered mobile networks became subject to filtering as well, what had been an alternative means of access to an uncensored Internet. Circumvention tools have long been used within the country, and are often made accessible by cybercafe owners. But most tools lack protection against technological surveillance, and Tor--which provides anonymity as well as circumvention--has been blocked on some Syrian ISPs in recent months.

On June 3, EFF will begin live coverage of a critical discussion about online freedom of expression held by the 47 member states of the U.N Human Rights Council during its seventeenth session in Geneva. The meeting will include the introduction of a landmark report to the Council by United Nations Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue that advocates safeguards to protect free expression online including privacy and anonymity.

Demonstrations and protests over unemployment and poor living conditions have been ongoing in Tunisia since the beginning of December, but last week the Tunisian government turned up the heat on bloggers, activists, and dissidents by launching a JavaScript injection attack that siphoned off the usernames and passwords of Tunsians logging in to Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. The Tunisian government has used these stolen credentials to log in to Tunisians’ email and Facebook accounts, presumably downloading their messages, emails, and social graphs for further analysis, and then deleting the accounts entirely.

The copyright troll Righthaven has brought over 190 casesand countingagainst bloggers, online journalists and others since March of this year. While EFF has taken on two of these cases directly (Democratic Underground and DiBiase) we have also been attempting to help those sued to secure counsel. If the tactics of these trolls trouble you and you are a member of the bar with experience in copyright litigation, these defendants need your help.